The fabled tutorial thread on ViewingDale

[Redrobes]

On that menu there is the option to load an icon. Thats the 'L' key and just loads an icon from a file selecton of icon files.

There is no save. ViewingDale saves everything all the time. There is an undo for the child edit by pressing 'U' but normally all actions are done and saved instantly.

The refresh is rarely used as this is only useful if you externally edit a file like an icon text file using a text editor and then you can refresh the screen.

The images and icons are stored as files in directories under the main installation dir. If you pick these file up and move them then they will be badly referenced from child icons or icons will call up bad pathed images. So in order to move these files and fix up all the references to them there are two options to move an icon or move an image. You should use these if you really need to or else you could find yourself looking at text file references to fix !

You can change the current icons image with an option here which can be quite useful.

Set the icons size means to do what the Edit Size mode does only with numeric input. So you can specify that this battle map is exactly 100 yds by 200 yds for example.

Adding a child icon we mentioned earlier.

There are the special icons you can add. The main one is text. By pressing T you get an edit box where you can type in some text, select its color and it will appear as a child icon on the current icon. When editing it you will note that it does not have a green handle because text always rotates so that its horizontal. You must remember that all icons in ViewingDale may be used multiply and in different orientations and scales. The extents box for text is thus circular to depict where text might possible lie at any rotation.

Next on the Child Action types is a jump. You can put down the blue and yellow marker with the arrow on it and select another map to jump to. This is useful for going up stairs entering buildings or just having a list of maps to index.

You can add a link to a document too. That can be a text file, a doc, rich text or whatever. You can set the document reader so if all your docs are PDF say then thats ok too.

Theres picture links too of course. By default the app is tied to the ViewingDale Picture Viewer which is a super fast simple image display. Again tho, you have the option of opening with any image viewer that can take a command line parameter for the image to look at.

You can add a sound link as well which can add some atmosphere to your gameplay.

Next is a web link where you can link to any web page like this one !

Finally there is a general file link. Some caution here is that it will launch whatever file is behind the link. That might not be a good idea if you get the map from someone you dont trust. But there is the possibility that you can run your own program or something unusual.

You can check out some of the links in the demo download. In that mini map is a link to text, a picture, and a jump to another map.